Victim blaming is fine, when it's not us

So every time you have a terror attack - 9/11 especially -, usually it's a sign of bad taste and horrible personality to suggest the country which fell victim to the attack may had something to do with why the attack was perpetrated. So the last seven-eight decades of US policies in the Middle East had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, and if you mentioned that they might, you were defiling the memory of the innocent victims, and were an America-hater, who should really just go and kill themselves silently, as they are beyond redemption. After all, claiming that the terrorists acted because of a grievance would justify their actions, right? And if we do this, then we use the lives of those innocent victims to further our agenda, right? Excusing the actions of the terrorists, that's what it is! This is not the right time to discuss these things, not while the bodies are still warm... so there will be no lessons learned. Ever.

(Which is a convenient stance because we don't need to take a look at ourselves, and it also has the added benefit of making it impossible to treat the root of the issue, hence we will always have a convenient threat we can point at when we chip away civil liberties, and bomb countries.)


The same is true with all the terror attacks that happened in Europe; saying that France's or Belgium's inability to assimilate large amount of immigrants might have something to do with what happened (they are rather be focusing on a straw men claiming the attackers were domestic born), that Germany's decision to let fresh immigrants in might have something to do with these things, that the UK's, France's actions in the Middle East and North Africa might have something to do with what happened, is an anathema. "Fringe" papers and websites (whose readership reaches into the high dozens) do discuss these connections, but "reputable" newspapers and other media outlets will never touch this topic; instead they present a whitewashed picture of ourselves, and how those scary terrorists are hating us for our freedoms.

But not when it comes to the Ruskies.

They are to be totally blamed for what happened. (Published mere days after the attack.) But, wait, the hypocrisy is not finished! After all, the Ruskies are responding with revenge (forgot about Afghanistan and Iraq yet?), and their foreign policy is repugnant... Definitely forgot about Iraq and Afghanistan, then.

The double standards are astonishing.

Addendum. Well, it didn't take long, did it? Hypocrites.

Terrorism and the Balkan route -perceptions last year and today

So it seems like Abdeslam did use the Balkan route for smuggling terrorists into Europe. So did others.

Let this sink in for a while. Even though it seems like people have a memory of a goldfish (not to mention politicians and journalists, who are entirely possible that not members of the same species as the rest of us), let's just recall a couple of things from last year. Like that infamous cartoon with the rats. (Let's forget that the whole outrage was manufactured since the cartoon did not suggest what the outraged journalists said it did.) Or that the EU's counter terrorism chief said there was unlikely to be a connection between migrants and terrorists. Or ask the UN High Commissioner for refugees. Or the fact that the entire Left in Hungary (and the international press) used this as a political tool against the Hungarian government instead of actually recognising the threat unchecked migration (or worse, if they did, they used it as a weapon against Orban nevertheless. Priorities, I guess.)

Curiously all these people are silent now. The news that terrorists indeed used the Balkan route is quietly dropped and forgotten. No mea culpas, no retrospective analyses how they could been so wrong, how the others who were right were painted as the villains... No; this whole business is best left forgotten, and move on to the next shouting campaign without any lessons learned.

Guess what. This is what gave you Brexit and Trump. This is why the Far Right is getting stronger everywhere. You can't just call everyone you disagree with a racist neckbeard, and you especially can't do that (and keep doing it) when they are right and you are wrong. You might have the bullhorn to shout, but the credibility deficit is growing. You probably should have noticed after the Brexit vote or Trump's victory that things are not so swell outside your bubble, but you apparently have not.

I guess we're all going to suffer for it.

So Sebastian Kurz told Profil that only the best educated migrants should be allowed in Austria.

(Could not find the original German article, and strangely no English reports are available on this interesting take on helping war refugees. If it helps, here's a Hungarian report of the interview.)

Let's ignore the fact that had Szijjarto said something like this on behalf of Hungary, the whole Western media would be screaming about racism and the rest.

Let's just think about the implication of this statement a bit, shall we?

Option #1: we are talking about war refugees. The Austrian minister essentially says that we only should help the well educated, rich refugees, and leave the rest to their fate.
This, if you ask me, is an insanely un-European attitude; I'd hazard to say it would justify a little international uproar. After all, this is a very cold-hearted, and frankly evil stance. We can safely say it reminds us to the darkest moments of European history.

Option #2: we are talking about economic migrants. In this case it's a fair stance, however it ignores a lot of things that should have been discussed before even one economic migrant was let over the border.
These things are:
1. why are we allowing in millions of economic migrants in the first place?
2. why did the mass of people start walking towards Europe last year?
3. why are we trying to impose hypocrisy costs on countries who refuse to allow economic migrants into their countries? You have no right trying to shame and coerce countries to accept economic migrants, after all.
4. Why nobody's talking about the costs and benefits of taking millions of economic migrants?

These question, obviously, will not be asked either by the media or the politicians. They seem to be quite content on using this sliding scale of "war refugees" and "migrants" whenever it fits their narrative, trusting that the average reader is an idiot who cannot see how he or she is manipulated. And the worst thing is that it seems to be working. Nobody stops to think about these issues; they read a short article, they take up the war cry, then move on. A couple of days later they repeat the same process with another article which is diagonally opposing to their previous opinion. It works with everything; even when these two opposing things happen at the same time: take the war crime that is the siege of Aleppo, and the heroic liberation that is the siege of Mosul.

Conflicting ideologies on the Left

You could ask me (not that anyone bothers :) ) why I focus on the Left so much.

Well, the answer is simple: I expect more of them than the usual tribalism, and ideology-driven thinking I kind of taken granted from the Right. (In which I myself display my own set of biases and bigotry.)

Anyhow. The import of "Taharrush gamea" (the mass sexual assaults on women by young men) into Europe with the recent migrant crisis points to a very interesting contradiction on the Left.

I associate the Left with human rights, women's rights, equality, feminism. Usually left-wing thinkers campaign for these things, and usually people on the left fought for them. Most feminist writers I know identify as someone being on the left. And yet, when it comes to these sexual assaults, both the political establishment, and the media is strangely silent; it's mostly the right-center right that is vocal about them. It seems like things flip upside down when it comes to migrants and sexual assaults: the Left is content blaming the victim ("keep them at arm's length" as the mayor of Cologne suggested; blaming drinking culture, as some people in Sweden suggested), while the Right wants to defend women against these men from a very different culture.

It is mind-boggling. Jessica Valenti is silent on the matter, even though she was quite vocal during even the Shirt Gate crisis. No prominent feminist writer in left-wing papers talk about these issues. It seems like the different ideologies (multiculturalism, Wilcommenculture, feminism, human rights) have this rock-paper-scissors dynamics. Apparently multiculturalism beats feminism when it comes to migrants. And this is sad, because it points to one thing: not even the Left has a coherent world-philosophy. (Well, very few on the Left does, let's just put it like this. Chomsky would probably have no problems processing these issues.) It shows that the Left is merely a collection of activists with very little intellectual power (or just simply too lazy). People who cannot or will not comprehend that things don't have to be mutually exclusive, so when one ideology (feminism) clashes with another (open borders, multiculturalism), one will lose out. I just had a conversation with someone who said the whole issue was blown out of proportion due to "some improper touching in Cologne that happened once". The mind blows. Suddenly I have a leftie who blames women, and trivialises sexual assault -something that is usually thought to be the privilege of the Right.

This leads to this weird reversal of roles between the Left and Right. I never thought one day I'd see Farage to be more of a feminist than Merkel.

The blatant hypocrisy about refugees in the West

So Manuel Valls is now saying the refugee crisis is destabilizing Europe, and that the borders need to be protected, and that we can't just take anyone who wanders across the borders.
Other Western politicians talked about the cultural effect the large influx of refugees causes, the financial burden, the need to protect the borders.

And yet, when Orban was saying (and doing) the very same thing not 6 months ago, he was a far-right politician, a racist, and a Nazi -not to mention the whole nation of Hungary along with him.

The hypocrisy is maddening. And one of the worst thing is that from a staunch anti-Fidesz voter I have became quite sympathetic to the asshole; after all, he still looks like a better alternative than his critics. If you judge someone by his enemies, Orban is actually a pretty good guy. And for this: fuck you Valls, fuck you Faymann, fuck you The Guardian, and Der Spiegel.
You had no right to make a pro-Orban thinker out of me.

Cologne and the press

There were a series of mass attacks on women during New Year's Eve; attacks which were coordinated, committed by people who "look African and Middle Eastern", and attacks which did not really get a lot of attention from the media for a long time. Even the police reported initially that all was well... The very first thing that came to my mind was the fact that the far right was actually using this as a warning cry to whip up the fear: they are coming to rape your daughters... we came to an age when closet Nazis are more dependable source of information than the mainstream media. The second thing actually reinforced this notion: it took an awful lot of time and misinformation for the facts to come out: it was not committed by Germans, or by people who have been living in Germany for decades. These attacks were prominently committed by newcomers, who were arriving as refugees.

The media outlets took up this story very slowly. The Guardian specifically was silent for five full days; even though they were really fast to comment on the Shirtgate, or on Mattelgate (the missing female figurine), and were really eager to jump to conclusions on refugee matters as well previously. But now they were taking their time. Suddenly everyone is surprised, as if this was not predicted before. Well, guess what. It has. Cairo and Sweden had experienced similar attacks (which was promptly covered up by the police); it was not really difficult to imagine something like this can happen in areas where refugees/economic migrants were present en masse. Suddenly people are surprised about the skewed sex ratio- oh, my, there's a lot of men in the crowd! Too bad, though they called everyone a Nazi who said the very same thing before; and interestingly this fact did not register for the photographers, either, who spent a year trying to pick up the odd little girl from the crowds of young men for emotional photos about the plight of the refugees.

The Guardian's rich and very excitable feminist writers are also silent; as if actual attacks of women's basic rights were not worth the effort. Even the victim-blaming from the Major of Cologne was left unmentioned... This cartoon sums up everything nicely.

But the Guardian was not silent on other matters. It was running a really long feature on the Two Tailed Dog party, in which they equated Orban with the Far Right (which he is not), and that idiot who charged a police station in France and got shot was featured prominently on the front page, too. It took five days for articles on Cologne to appear. One even called for asking for tough questions, but then avoided to do so.
One genius piece managed to have the following two quotes in the same article:

Abroad, Merkel will work for burden sharing, tougher measures to patrol Europe’s borders and seek solutions to stop the refugees at source

Already the venomous Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is calling for tougher border controls,

Really?

It seems like the media by propagating the idea of uncontrolled migration boxed itself into a corner it cannot come out of without looking foolish or criminally negligent. And what they are doing now is just as bad.

The main problem is: this sort of behaviour completely surrenders the issue to the far right. It only gets stronger when the media does not report, lies, when the media and the police covers these things up, when you label everyone with concerns racist... you are responsible for turning away from the victims (the women who were assaulted), and you are responsible for the strengthening of the far right, and the gangs who mete out their own justice, and beat up Middle Eastern people on the street.

Islamophobia and Hungary

This whole clusterfuck with the refugee crisis levelled a great deal of accusation of racism and xenophobia against the country.

Let's just forget for a second what 160 thousand plus people pouring over the border will do to people's attitudes; let's no discuss other aspects about the whole "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation the country is in presently. Let's not discuss right now how Fidesz and Orban are making things worse, because they are moronic nationalistic fucks, and clueless amateurs.

Let's talk about Islamophobia, and why the average Hungarian is worried about Muslim people.

There are a couple of reasons for this. (These are explanations, not excuses.)

One is isolation; there is a precious little exposure to Muslims and Arabs for most Hungarians. They don't really know people who are either.

There's a historical reason as well: Hungary did not have a very good experience with Muslims in the past. The Ottoman Empire effectively cut the country in three, depopulated enormous areas which later were populated by other peoples (leading to the trauma of the Peace Treaties after WWI), and made the country ripe for subjugation for the Hapsburgs. People don't have fond historical memories of the Turkish occupation, and for most -unfair or not- this is the only exposure to the Islam.

And there's the fact that Western media is extremely anti-Muslim in its narrative. The picture they give to their viewers of the Middle East is a horrible place where these uncivilized barbarians are living under horrible dictators and religious fundamentalists (forgetting to mention the West's role in this), where everyone is violent and would happily blow himself up after raping your daughter screaming Allah Akbar. This is the picture coming from abroad; no wonder people have warped views. It's kind of rich for the very same journalists to condemn anti-Muslim sentiments that they themselves helped to foster.

An other is the whole Israel-Palestine narrative. The country -in this respects as well as in many- is well behind the curve. Here if you say that maybe, just maybe the Palestinians might have a point, you are an anti-Semite. Here the "land without people, people without land" bullshit still holds water. Here, when a famous liberal commentator/writer (TGM) writes a damning article in HVG (Heti Vilag Gazdasag) about the Gaza war, other left-wing liberals slam him, and call him an anti-Semite; furthermore, they say only Israel stands in the way of the Muslim hordes threatening Europe -and it's perfectly acceptable in a left-wing paper! This narrative shows these dirty Arabs throwing stones and blowing themselves up -and only if they stopped, there would be peace in the Middle East.

And this leads to my favorite people to hate: the left-wing intellectuals in Hungary. I am left-wing. I have socialist views, I have liberal views (and some conservatives as well) - I feel more at home with Bernie Sanders than Hillary Clinton. However, the Hungarian versions of Chomsky are frankly spineless, intellectually corrupt little fucks. Tota W Arpad (who was one of those people condemning TGM for daring to express sympathy to the Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza), Agnes Heller, and yes, Imre Kertesz, the Saint Nobel Price Winner Holocaust Survivor, and Scourge of Hungary, who likes to point out how terribly racist Hungarians are, and how horrible that only in this country you can find racist people, and drawing subtle parallels between the Holocaust and the Fidesz government (while alluding collective guilt over the Holocaust).

What has this gentleman said not long ago?

Let's see.

“Europe will soon go under because of its previous liberalism which has proven childish and suicidal. Europe produced Hitler, and after Hitler there stands a continent with no arguments: the doors are wide open for Islam; no longer does anyone dare talk about race and religion, while at the same time Islam only knows the language of hatred against all foreign races and religions,” writes Kertész in his book, according to a summary by the blogger Thomas Nydahl.

“I should say a few words about politics too… Then I would talk about how Muslims are flooding, occupying, in no uncertain terms, destroying Europe; about how Europe relates to this, about the suicidal liberalism and the stupid democracy… It always ends the same way: civilization reaches a stage of maturation where it is not only unable to defend itself, but where it in a seemingly incomprehensible manner worships its own enemy.”

Doesn't he sound like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, or Gabor Vona of the Jobbik? I think he remarkably does. (This, of course, was never picked up by the Guardian and other international news portals; after all, it's not Orban we're talking about.) Let me be clear of this: this is not an isolated statement, made by a rambling old man. 

So. Xenophobia and racism is only bad if it's anti-Semitism. (As I said, this sort of thinking is quite accepted in the Hungarian left, which likes to depict itself as the epitome of liberalism.) As a little amusing side-note, someone actually told me that he is right to be afraid of Muslims; he was in the death camps... This person, of course, knew that the Nazis were not Muslims, but apparently, they must be just as bad.

So, Muslims are bad.

And NOW we hate Orban because he talks a lot more moderately than Kertesz himself? Are we surprised that this has a lot of effect on people who never in their lives met or talked to an Arab or Muslim person are worried? They get this from abroad and from home; from the left or the right. After all, Kertesz and the Jobbik finally can agree on something! It must be true!

So before you condemn the average Joe because he is worried about the Muslim hordes, perhaps you should condemn those who lit this fire and keep pouring gasoline on it.